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3.43 AVERAGE
3.43 AVERAGE
Pretentious and boring. Maybe would have enjoyed if I'd been in a different headspace, but this just didn't catch for me.
challenging
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Wow. Is more Nadine Gordimer work in my future? This collection of stories is delicious with a eerie tinge. Perhaps the reader feels like a voyeur peeking into the lives of others with whom you do not want to be like but know you are. Perhaps the intricate renderings of the human condition feel too gross to look at head on but feel so true in their realness. The opening story was my favorite that has stuck with me. It’s a shame I found this in the giveaway pile from my community college library purge. It had never been checked out. Despite Georgia O’Keefe’s Wave Night on my hardback copy’s cover. She now lives with me to inspire my short story writing dreams.
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
"The reflection of the moon seeped through the endless insubstantial surface, silence inundated this place he had brought me to; the village existed out there no more that it had ever done for me when I had never sat in its square, never eaten under the glass eyes of timid beasts killed in its chestnut forests and mountains, or sat in the shade of its surviving mulberry tree."
"It was scarcely worth noticing at first; an out-of-work lying under one of the rare indigenous shrubs cultivated by the Botany Department on campus. Some of us remembered, afterwards, having passed him. And he--or another like him--was seen rummaging in the refuse bins behind the Student Union; one of us (a girl, of course) thrust out awkwardly to him a pitta she'd just bought for herself at the canteen, and she flushed with humiliation as he turned away mumbling. When there were more of them, the woman in charge of catering came out with a kitchen-hand in a blood-soaked apron to chase them off like a band of marauding monkeys."
"It was scarcely worth noticing at first; an out-of-work lying under one of the rare indigenous shrubs cultivated by the Botany Department on campus. Some of us remembered, afterwards, having passed him. And he--or another like him--was seen rummaging in the refuse bins behind the Student Union; one of us (a girl, of course) thrust out awkwardly to him a pitta she'd just bought for herself at the canteen, and she flushed with humiliation as he turned away mumbling. When there were more of them, the woman in charge of catering came out with a kitchen-hand in a blood-soaked apron to chase them off like a band of marauding monkeys."
I've started the book and was intrigued with the first few pages. Yet the stream of consciousness style writing left me feeling dizzy and confused when combined with South African politics and politicians. I will move on to the next short story in the series and see how it goes...
Some of these stories were brilliant. Others... well, I could not really get. I therefore have no idea how to rate this book: I would rate the stories I considered brilliant with a 5, but the others have no rating in my mind.
"It's easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing."
"Death is a blank mirror, emptied of all it has seen and shown."
"Death is a blank mirror, emptied of all it has seen and shown."